You have OFT, Competition Commission and Brussels politicians. Each needs to justify their existence, so they have to pretend that research needs to be done into anti-competitiveness of proposed merger.

Eliminating competition is by default anti-competitive and it's obvious that consumers will loose on this merger. Orange and T-Mobile would need to pay off right people and merger will be approved. What OFT, etc. are doing is getting arguments together in order to get bigger bribe.

If this merger would be denied it would mean that agencies in this country actually doing their job.

Note that pending acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T in US is much more exciting as it would result in single GSM monopoly in US, if approved.